Portable electronic devices, such as traditional personal digital assistants (“PDAs”), smartphones, mobile multimedia players, etc., often incorporate applications for viewing images such as pictures stored in an image or graphics format (e.g. attachment viewer, browser, picture viewer, etc.) When the images to be viewed originate from multiple sources (e.g. local SD memory card, Flickr® account, Picasa® account, computer desktop, Unite!™ server, etc.), a user typically either uses specific “thin” client applications to view the pictures (e.g. Moblica Picasa®, JiveSlide™, Yahoo® Go!, etc.) or synchronize pictures with a computer desktop (e.g. SplashPhoto™, Ascendo™, MobiPhoto™, etc.), or manually copies the images from the multiple source locations/providers to local device memory or SD memory card prior to viewing the images on the device. Switching between multiple specific client applications in order to view pictures is time consuming and potentially confusing for users, while copying from the image source locations/providers to local memory is also time consuming and may present the user with certain challenges in terms of reducing image size for display on the device, choosing a memory storage location/folder to save the images, synchronizing the device with new images, etc. Also, the lack of a common application user interface for downloading, viewing and performing operations on the images (e.g. tagging, searching, emailing, etc.) may further complicate the user picture viewing experience.
Patent publications that are relevant to this specification include U.S. Pat. No. 7,197,531 (Anderson), US Patent Publication No. 2005/0250548 (White), and the following patent publications of Lin et al: US Patent Publication Nos. 2008/0195962, 2008/0195712, 2008/0194276 and WO 2008/100893. Anderson discloses a method and system for integrating web photo-services for a browser-enabled device using a gateway server with software on the client device that reports the contents of the device to the gateway server. White discloses an image browser for a phone that connects to a single image server and allows a user to tag a picture for performance of another action (e.g. e-mail, MMS). Lin et al disclose a web site to manage multimedia data and a thin client application on a mobile device that runs in the background to process synchronization requests received from the server, wherein the server manages activities made by a user on the web site.
Relevant non-patent prior art includes Portable Universal Viewer Pro by Softoogle and Universal Viewer by UVWiewsoft, which support viewing multiple file formats but do not support viewing images from multiple sources, as well as GooglePreview and CoolPreviews by Mozilla.